Wages did not stagnate. The unit of measure shrank.
In 1913 a US dollar bought an ounce of silver. In 2026 it buys one fortieth of one. This is not an accident, not a market outcome, and not a side effect. It is the documented working mechanism of the financial system that has run since the Federal Reserve Act passed on 23 December 1913.
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How to read this site
1. The history
Six anchored dates. 1815, the start of a hundred years of stable money. 1913, the door closed. 1933, gold confiscated. 1944, the dollar pyramid. 1971, the cut. 2008 to 2022, the late stage.
How banks create money out of nothing (the Bank of England said so in 2014). How new money reaches asset holders first (Cantillon, 1730). How the inflation tax and bracket creep extract from the rest.
The same hour of median labour now buys nine times less gold than in 1971, half the housing, a fraction of the education and healthcare. Two earners do what one earner used to do.
The Federal Reserve. The European Central Bank. The Bank for International Settlements. The IMF. Named institutions, dated decisions, public minutes. No conspiracy. Public coordination is sufficient.
The financial system did not arrive in one piece. It was built. Six dates explain how. Each one is a dated event in a public record, with a primary source.
1815
Classical gold standard begins
For the next 98 years, the UK general price level falls. UK CPI in 1913 sits 23 percent below 1815.
In a single year, the United States ratifies both the 16th Amendment (income tax, February) and the Federal Reserve Act (December 23). Two halves of one mechanism.
Executive Order 6102, 5 April 1933. Americans surrender gold to the Federal Reserve at $20.67 per ounce. The state then revalues to $35. The expropriation is legal.
Sunday, 9pm, 15 August. Nixon: "I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold." Temporary has lasted 55 years.
Lehman fails. The Fed balance sheet quadruples to $4.5 trillion in six years. It has not retraced since. GAO audit 2011: $16 trillion in emergency loans, mostly to non US institutions.
M2 grows 40.4% from February 2020 to April 2022. The largest peacetime monetary expansion in US history. CPI peaks at 9.1 percent in June 2022, on schedule.
On 15 August 1971 the United States severed the dollar's last link to gold. "Temporarily," the President said. The link has not been restored. Watch what comes loose when the chain breaks.
YEAR1944
GOLD, USD per OZ$35
CONVERTIBILITYON
On the air, that night:
"I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets."
Richard Nixon, Address to the Nation, 15 August 1971.
The chain. From 1944 to 1971, the dollar was redeemable for gold at $35 the ounce. Foreign central banks could ask, and they did. France was first. Switzerland was next. The gold flowed out.
The cut. On a Sunday evening, 9pm Eastern, Nixon went on air to suspend convertibility. No congressional debate, no treaty renegotiation, no advance notice to allies. The price of gold went from $35 to $97 inside two years.
What it means. From that night, the dollar's value rests on nothing but the policy of the Federal Reserve. Every chart that goes vertical (M2, federal debt, asset prices, home prices) starts climbing in 1971. The yardstick was unmoored. It is still drifting. Read the full account →
The press doesn't stop. The dollar shrinks.
This is what "money printer go brrr" actually looks like. Every dollar that leaves the press makes every existing dollar buy slightly less. Scroll. The real numbers come from the Federal Reserve's M2 series.
YEAR1971
US MONEY SUPPLY (M2)$685 B
$1 BUYS100%of what it bought in 1971
What you see. A printing press. A pile of dollar bills growing on the floor. A gold coin on the right that shrinks as more bills print. That is it. That is the whole mechanism.
Why it shrinks. A dollar is a share in the total pile of dollars. Doubling the pile cuts each share in half. More dollars chasing the same loaves of bread, hours of work, ounces of gold means each dollar buys less of them.
The numbers. US M2 grew from $0.69 trillion in 1971 to $22.7 trillion in 2026. That is a 33 fold expansion in 55 years. The press did not stop. How the press actually works →
Banks do not lend money. They create it.
Every loan is a keystroke. The deposit it creates is new money that did not exist a moment before. The Bank of England spelled it out in 2014. Richard Werner proved it empirically the same year. Watch the ledger: both sides grow together, and the vault behind it stays empty.
LOANS SIGNED0
NEW MONEY CREATED$0
TAKEN FROM SAVINGS$0No deposit was lent. No reserve was moved.
The Bank of England, in its own words:
"Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money."
Bank of England, Quarterly Bulletin Q1 2014, Money creation in the modern economy.
The textbook is wrong. Banks do not collect savings and lend them out. The loan comes first. The deposit is created by the act of lending, on opposite sides of the same balance sheet, in the same second.
The vault is empty. Nothing moves when a loan is signed. No gold, no cash, no money from any saver. The bank types a number into the borrower's account and new money exists.
97 percent of all money. Nearly all money in a modern economy consists of bank deposits created exactly this way. Physical cash is the remaining sliver. Read the full mechanism, with sources →
New money does not fall on everyone.
Two staircases. One for assets (stocks, real estate, gold). One for wages. New money rains from above. It only lands on the asset side. Watch the gap open.
YEAR1971
ASSETS (S&P 500, indexed)1971 = 100100
WAGES (median income, indexed)1971 = 100100
What you see. Same starting line, 1971 = 100. Same money supply pumping into the economy. The asset staircase climbs to 6000+. The wage staircase reaches barely 800.
Why the gap. New money enters the system through banks and asset markets first. It pushes asset prices up before it reaches paychecks. Asset holders get the gain; wage earners get the bill, in higher rents and prices.
The mechanism is named. Richard Cantillon described it in 1730. The first receivers of new money win at the expense of the last receivers. The first receivers in the post 1971 system are the people who already own assets. Read the mechanism in detail →
One number to keep in mind.
~97%
Loss of purchasing power of the US dollar between 1913 and 2026, measured by the BLS Consumer Price Index. Roughly 99% measured against gold. The dollar of your great grandparents bought, in real terms, thirty to one hundred times more goods than the dollar in your wallet today.
Type the year you were born. The site will compute, from BLS and Federal Reserve primary data, what has happened to the dollar in your lifetime. The numbers are not opinions.
Enter a year between 1947 and 2008.
Since 1985, on Federal Reserve and BLS data:
Purchasing power lost
68%
measured by BLS CPI
$1 today buys
32¢
of what it bought in 1985
$1 in 1985 now costs
$3.16
in 2026 dollars
US money supply grew
9.8×
times in your lifetime
Sources: BLS CPIAUCSL and Federal Reserve M2SL via FRED.
Share your year → Opens a page for your birth year that you can send to anyone.
What the median household lost.
Wages did not stagnate. The unit of measure shrank. The same hour of median labour buys less of every essential thing today than it did in 1971. These are not opinions. They are time to buy ratios calculated from primary data, with sources beneath each card.
Hours of median work to buy 1 oz of gold
19719.9
→
202693
9.4× more
You work nine times longer for the same ounce.
LBMA gold AM fix; BLS median hourly earnings.
Years of median household income for a median home
1971~2.8
→
2024~5.1
1.8× more
A median home now consumes more than five years of household income, before tax.
Census MSPUS; Atlanta Fed Affordability Monitor; JCHS Harvard.
Years of median income for a 4 year degree (public, in state)
19710.60
→
20241.24
2.1× more
Twice the years of work for the same diploma.
NCES Digest of Education Statistics; Census P 60.
Health care spending per capita as % of median income
19714.3%
→
202418.1%
4.2× more
Health care alone now eats one in six of every dollar earned.
CMS National Health Expenditure data; Census P 60.
Type your gross hourly wage in US dollars. We send it back to 1971 at equal purchasing power, then check what the same real wage could carry then and against the old yardstick now. Your wage is not the problem. The unit it is paid in is.
$
Enter an hourly wage between 1 and 10,000 dollars.
Your wage in 1971
$3.58
per hour. Same purchasing power, 1971 price tags, by CPI.
One ounce of gold costs you
136 hours
of work today. In 1971, at your same real wage: 9.8 hours.
The median house costs you
6.5 years
of gross work today. In 1971, at your same real wage: 3.3 years.
If your wage had followed M2
$129.14
per hour today. Since 1971 the money supply multiplied 36 times; consumer prices 8.4 times. The gap went somewhere, just not into wages.
Sources: FRED CPIAUCSL, M2SL, MSPUS (median sales price of houses sold). Gold: London PM fix, $35 until 15 August 1971, about $4,080 in 2026 (World Gold Council). Work year counted as 2,080 gross hours.
The two lines that explain everything
On the same axes, indexed to 1959 = 100. Money supply (M2) versus what one dollar can buy. They move in opposite directions, and they have not stopped. Three vertical lines mark the inflection points: 1971 (gold window closes), 2008 (Lehman, QE begins), 2020 (zero rates, $5T stimulus).
Sources: FRED CPIAUCSL and FRED M2SL. Log scale on the vertical axis. Data fetched from FRED's public CSV endpoint and embedded statically.
A graveyard of dead currencies, and one survivor.
Every documented hyperinflation in history shares the same six step mechanism: deficit, monetisation, supply explosion, depreciation, velocity spike, collapse. The dollar has not collapsed. The mechanism has been operating in the dollar at unprecedented intensity since 2020.
Hungary
1946
PEAK MONTHLY4.19 × 10¹⁶ %
Doubling every ~15 hours10
Worst recorded. Prices doubled every 15 hours. Forint reform 1 Aug 1946.
Zimbabwe
2008
PEAK MONTHLY79.6 billion %
Doubling every ~25 hours10
Doubling time ~25h. ZWD abandoned 2009. USD/ZAR adopted spontaneously.
Yugoslavia
1994
PEAK MONTHLY313 million %
Doubling every ~34 hours10
Sanctions + war funding. Avramović plan, 24 Jan 1994, pegged to DEM.
Weimar
1923
PEAK MONTHLY29,500 %
Doubling every ~3.7 days10
4.2 trillion mark per USD. Reparations monetisation. Rentenmark 15 Nov.
Venezuela
2016+
PEAK MONTHLY233 % monthly
PDVSA monetisation. 14 zeros removed via three redenominations 2008 to 2021.
Lebanon
2019+
PEAK MONTHLY~98 % currency loss
Banque du Liban Ponzi collapse. Peak 269 % CPI YoY April 2023.
Argentina
chronic
PEAK MONTHLY289 % YoY (2024)
5 redenominations since 1970. Cagan threshold breached 1989.
Turkey
2021+
PEAK MONTHLY85.5 % YoY
Lira lost ~79% vs USD 2021 to 2024. TCMB rate cuts during inflation.
US Dollar
1971 to 2026
PEAK MONTHLY~97 % cumulative
M2 grew 33x, asset buffer absorbing the expansion. The mechanism is the same; the amplitude differs.
The running numbers animate at compressed time, one second on screen is six hours of history. The doubling times are the documented values (Hanke and Krus).
Three central bank digital currencies are already live. Over 130 jurisdictions have CBDC programs in design or pilot. The eurozone, UK, and India sit in advanced phases. The technical decision being taken in 2026 is whether the next form of money will be programmable by the state or sovereign to its holder. There is no third option.
YEAR2026
PROGRAMMABLEcentral bank digital currency
SOVEREIGNgold, hard digital assets
The left path. A CBDC is a direct claim on the central bank, settled on a state ledger. Every transaction is logged. Programmable rules can expire balances, restrict purchases, prefer or punish categories of goods, geofence transactions, freeze accounts. The 2022 Canadian truckers protest, settled by debanking individuals through commercial banks, is the working preview at lower fidelity.
The right path. Bearer assets settle in their own time. Gold has worked for 5,000 years. A digital bearer asset, custodied directly, settles without intermediation. The defining property is non confiscation by software update. Every other property follows from that one.
What is at stake. The post 1971 system is fragile. The next form of the dollar will either harden the existing extraction (programmable, monitored, default) or open an exit (sovereign, bearer, optional). The 2026 to 2030 window is when the technical defaults are written. After that, the path dependence is severe. Read the full account →
Built on primary data
Every chart on this site is rendered from a primary source. The knowledge base lists each source with a working link. Verify anything that surprises you.
FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis): M2, CPI, balance sheet, federal funds rate, S and P 500, median home price, real wages.
Bank of England: Millennium of Macroeconomic Data 1209 to present.
BLS: Consumer Price Index, productivity, real earnings.
World Gold Council: central bank reserves, gold price history.
Now you know how it works.
Most people do not. They feel the squeeze and read about wages, gas prices, housing, the cost of getting older. They are not told that the unit of measure has been shrinking by design since 1913, and at speed since 1971. If anything on this page clarified that, send it on.
The US dollar has lost about 97 percent of its purchasing power since 1913, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI.
"Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money." Bank of England, Quarterly Bulletin Q1 2014.
Since 1971 the US money supply (M2) has multiplied 36 times. Consumer prices multiplied 8.4 times. FRED M2SL and CPIAUCSL.
All 56 documented hyperinflations in history happened in paper or credit money. Not one under a commodity standard. Hanke and Krus, Cato Institute, 2012.
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